


Sew Your Fortunes On A String

by SugarFey



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-23
Updated: 2014-04-23
Packaged: 2018-01-20 12:43:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1510889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SugarFey/pseuds/SugarFey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"I can’t help thinking that if I hadn’t brought you in, you could’ve found a better life than this."</i>
</p>
<p>How do you rebuild when everything you knew is gone?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sew Your Fortunes On A String

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [apologies won't save your soul](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1428532) by [SugarFey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SugarFey/pseuds/SugarFey). 



> This is a companion to 'apologies won't save your soul,' but it isn't necessary to have read that fic first. Many thanks to Enigma731 for the beta!

Natasha sleeps for almost ten hours, more than she’s slept all week. When she wakes up her legs are sore from lying on Clint’s couch. His bed across the room is empty, but she hears the shower running in the bathroom.

The safe house suddenly feels suffocatingly small, and she pulls on her shoes without a second thought, tying the laces as fast as she can. She glances toward the bathroom door, hesitates, and then scribbles a note on the stack of post-its on the desk in the corner. _Gone jogging._ She sticks it to the backrest of the couch, where he is most likely to see it.

She runs through the woods around the safe house until her lungs are about to burst, until her heart races and her legs are burning. The moment she stops her position feels too exposed, too vulnerable. She scans the treetops, certain that every sniper in the world has her in their sights. Being out in the open is suddenly torture, and she doubles over, forces herself to breathe for a few minutes against the relentless pounding in her brain, before making her way back to the house.

She returns to find Clint in the small kitchenette, wearing old jeans and a t-shirt bearing the name of a military base in faded lettering. She wonders if he wishes he’d stayed in the army now.

“Hey,” he greets, not looking up as he picks up a pot from the stove and pours steaming water into a mug. “Good run?”

“Okay.” She slips off her shoes and remembers to put her gun on the table. When she looks up she sees Clint watching her from across the room.

“The shower’s hot,” he says.

Natasha nods because talking seems like too much effort. She pulls a clean tank top and jeans out of her duffle and heads for the bathroom. Once inside, she locks the door behind her, testing it to make sure it would withstand an attempted break in.

The bathroom itself is tiny, with barely enough room for a shower, toilet and a small sink under a plain, square mirror. Mechanically, she strips off her clothes, folds them and places them on the toilet lid. Goosebumps spread across her skin and the tiles beneath her feet are like an ice rink, smooth, flawless, manufactured. She reaches up to untangle a knot from her hair and catches sight of her body in the mirror. A red, angry scar slashes across her collarbone. Above that, a pale, thin face made ashen by the harsh fluorescent light. The face seems alien and unknown, and Natasha stares at her reflection, trying to piece together who this person might be.

She doesn’t know how long she stands there but eventually she does step into the shower. The water is hot like Clint promised, and she lets it splash down over her face and shoulders and breasts, down onto her stomach and over scars old and new. She stays under the spray until the water is almost cold, watching the liquid swirl into the drain between her feet. Finally she turns off the tap and grabs a towel to dry herself, rubbing the fabric in hard strokes across her skin.

Natasha emerges from the bathroom with her hair wet, dirty clothes held loosely in one hand. Clint has his back to her, so she taps lightly on the doorframe because they’re both too jumpy right now.

He flinches a little, but he’s smiling when he turns. “Everything okay?”

Natasha nods, watching him closely. She hasn’t been this wary around him in years, and it hurts in a way she can’t quite explain. “It’s okay.”

Clint’s stance softens and she knows he’s noticed her hesitation around him. Painful resignation flickers across his face. “Want some tea?” he offers, surprising her. “I have black, or herbal. I think it’s chamomile.”

“Since when do you drink tea?”

Clint frowns. “Do you want it or not?”

“I’ll have chamomile,” Natasha answers, too tired to argue. She curls up on the couch and tries to read the book she shoved into her duffle bag when she left DC. In the past reading helped her unwind after a rough mission, and she needs to know if that, at least, is still true.

After a few minutes Clint wanders over and she looks up at him. He’s holding two steaming mugs in his hands. “Hey,” he says softly, offering her one. “Mind if I sit down?”

Before she would have rolled her eyes and patted the seat beside her or simply grabbed his wrist and pulled him down. Now she just shrugs and takes the mug from him. “If you want.”

The couch dips as Clint sits. “How was working with Rogers?”

She cups her hands around the hot ceramic and lets the warmth soak through her fingers. “Fine. He’s a good man, you know.”

Clint chuckles and it sounds hollow to her ears. “Never doubted that.”

Natasha takes a large sip of the tea and lets it burn down her throat. “Ironic, isn’t it?” she says bitterly.

“What is?”

“For two people who don’t trust easily, we should’ve doubted more.”

Clint sighs heavily. “Who do we know for sure is HYDRA?”

“Outside of DC? Not sure. It’s been happening pretty fast. Maria’s been tracking down agents loyal to SHIELD, I think.”

“Is that why you’re here?”

She doesn’t answer and the question hangs heavy in the air. She can feel Clint’s eyes on her, studying her closely like the hawk he was named for, and she schools her face to blankness.

After a while he seems to give up, and she wonders if this is the end of the conversation, if he’s going to walk away with her silence. Instead he sets his mug down on the floor and shifts further along the couch, away from her, but he doesn’t get up. “Natasha, did you…” His voice cracks, and she can see his shoulders tense and his jaw tighten. “Did you ever think, while this was going down, that I could be HYDRA?”

Her hand goes to her throat, subconsciously feeling for the pendant she removed before breaking into Clint’s safe house. “Not unless you’ve become a much better liar.”

He heaves a huge, shaky breath, but the tension doesn’t leave his body. “I’m sorry, Tasha.”

“Clint, stop,” Natasha interrupts, her hand touching his arm before she can think about it. She looks down at her fingers, her heart quickening, and decides to leave them there. “I wish you hadn’t left the way you did, but you had good reason to get away from everything.”

Clint makes a small noise of frustration. “No, I mean, I’m sorry for getting you into this mess. SHIELD, HYDRA, all of it.”

She pulls back sharply, wary again. “You didn’t know about HYDRA, none of us did,” she says, fighting to keep her voice calm.

“It’s just… I can’t help thinking that if I hadn’t brought you in, you could’ve found a better life than this.”

“It was my decision to join SHIELD, Clint,” she snaps. “Don’t you dare make this about you.”

Clint rests his head in his hands as his shoulders start to shake in earnest. Natasha watches him, unsure what to do. She would know how to treat him if he was a mark, but as a friend she’s worse than useless, and the realisation is sickening.

“I missed you,” he croaks. “So much.”

The pain in his voice breaks the fragile hold she’s had over herself; and something twists and grows inside her, creeping up her throat and breaking loose. She tries to cover her mouth but the sound bursts forth, a choking, horrible sob followed by another.

Clint’s arms are around her in an instant and she doesn’t resist, grabbing fistfuls of his shirt as the weight of all that happened in the past week comes crashing down on her.

“It’s okay, Tasha,” she hears Clint repeat, over and over, his voice as ragged as hers. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

* * *

 

She doesn’t want to turn on the TV because she doesn’t want to see her face on every channel, so Clint brings up a romantic comedy on his laptop and rests it at the foot of the bed. Natasha arranges a pillow behind her back and pulls her knees up under her chin as Clint sits back against the headrest, leaving a few inches of space between them.

Natasha laughs when the film wants her to laugh and Clint stays wordless throughout, until Colin Firth sees his former housekeeper on the balcony and pours his heart out to her in bad Portuguese. “Well,” Clint mutters, shifting on the bed. “I’ll take the couch.”

She knows it’s the right move, that the wounds are still fresh between them and they need time and space to rebuild, but the thought of being away from him now is too much. “No, Clint, I…” She shakes her head. “We can share the bed. It’s no different than before.”

He looks at her askance, because she’s lying and he knows it. They’ve shared beds often in the past, mostly as part of a cover, but now and then also for comfort. They’ve slept back to back under tarpaulins in Hanoi and shared sleeping bags in Tashkent, curling into each other for warmth like puppies, as Clint once put it. But they were partners then, set in the boundaries, and now, everything is at sea.

“Okay,” Clint says, slow and deliberate. “You got something to sleep in?”

Natasha shakes her head, because the clothes on her back and the contents of her bag are all she has to her name for the moment. She has emergency caches stashed in several cities across the globe, each containing a change of clothes, weapons, cash, fake passports, everything she needs to make a quick getaway. She emptied her cache in DC but going to her apartment for more supplies was too great a risk.

She wants to tell Clint that five days after he disappeared, she took the cheap arrow pendant off her dresser and fastened it around her neck. He’d given it to her as a joke, years ago, said he spotted it when he escaped a pursuer by dashing into a jewellery store in Hong Kong. She’d laughed at the time but never wore it, not until he left without any sign he was coming back.

“I can lend you a t-shirt and sweats,” Clint offers.

Natasha gives a noncommittal shrug. “If you like.”

He reaches into his dresser drawer, pulls out a soft grey t-shirt and black sweatpants and places them on the bed beside her. He keeps his back turned while she changes into it. The t-shirt smells of laundry soap, and, underneath, a scent that must be uniquely his. The sweatpants are far too loose around the waist, so she folds them over a few times and slides under the blanket. “Clint?”

“Yeah.” He lies down on top of the blanket, still keeping space between their bodies. “Didn’t have time to go home before you left?”

Natasha lays her head down on the pillow and tries to let the tiredness wash over her, but while her body is exhausted, she’s still too keyed up for sleep. “My apartment’s probably bugged to hell now.”

Clint tenses visibly, his eyes widening. “Fuck.”

Natasha stiffens, because her apartment is nothing but a bolthole to her, but Clint has always felt the need for some place of his own to call home. “Clint, they’ll have eyes on your place too. You can’t go back there.”

“I know, damn it. Just… fuck.” Clint presses the heel of his hand against his eye and she can make out how his brow furrows.

“Maybe Hill can store your things,” she suggests, knowing it won’t help.

“Yeah, I bet she’d love that,” he scoffs, humourlessly. “Hey, I know the organisation you’ve devoted your whole life to is dirty as fuck and crawling with neo-Nazis, but would you mind packing up my stuff please?”

“I’m sorry, Clint.”

“It’s not your fault,” he mutters, in an odd echo of their earlier conversation. He rolls onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. “It’s all gone, isn’t it.”

“Yes.”

“Fuck. I thought we were the good guys,” he says angrily, sitting up. “I thought I was bringing you to the good guys.”

“Please stop doing that,” she whispers, hating the way she starts to shake.

“Natasha? Shit, I’m sorry, please… can I touch you?”

She manages to nod, clutching the pillow beneath her.

Clint opens his arms and she moves into them. He holds her, rubbing one hand over her back and making soothing noises against her hair, and after a moment, she wraps herself around him and lays her head on his chest. She loses track of time as they lie there, until her breathing finally slows and the world stops spinning.

She looks up at him and brushes her hand against his jaw. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself,” he says, reaching up to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. “How’re you feeling?”

“Like shit,” she croaks, and her voice sounds pathetic to her ears. She presses her forehead against his to dull the ache. “But better.”

“That’s good,” he says, and brushes his lips against her cheek. “Better is good.”

She doesn’t know if she believes him, but she hopes he’s right.

 

 


End file.
